Safeguarding Public Values in Cooperation with Big Tech Companies: The Case of the Austrian Contact Tracing App Stopp Corona

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Valerie Eveline: “In April 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Austrian Red Cross announced it was encouraging a cooperation with Google and Apple’s Exposure Notification Framework to develop the so-called Stop Corona app – a contact tracing app which would support health personnel in monitoring the spread of the virus to prevent new infections (European Commission, 2020a). The involvement of Google and Apple to support combating a public health emergency fueled controversy over addressing profit-driven private interests at the expense of public values. Concerns have been raised about the dominant position of US based big tech companies in political decision concerning public values. This research investigates how public values are safeguarded in cooperation with big tech companies in the Austrian contact tracing app Stop Corona. Contact tracing apps manifest a bigger trend in literature, signifying power dynamics of big tech companies, governments, and civil society in relation to public values. The theoretical foundation of this research form prevailing concepts from Media and Communication Studies (MCS) and Science and Technology Studies (STS) about power dynamics such as the expansion of digital platforms and infrastructures, the political economy of big tech companies, dependencies, and digital platforms and infrastructure governance.

The cooperative responsibility framework guides the empirical investigation in four main steps. First steps identify key public values at stake and main stakeholders. After, public deliberations on advancing public values and the translation of public values based on the outcome of public deliberation are analyzed….(More)”.

Government transformations in times of extraordinary change: Key considerations for public-sector leaders

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Scott Blackburn, Thomas Harrington, Andrea Vidler, and Brooke Weddle: “Enacting major change in large, matrixed government organizations is always a challenge, with the COVID-19 pandemic adding another layer of complexity. Although just 20 percent of public-sector transformations meet their objectives, an equal focus on improving both performance and organizational health improves the odds of success by as much as 79 percent.

Maintaining a dual focus on performance and organizational health (see sidebar, “Defining performance and organizational health”) is even more important during periods of immense change. Leaders in high-pressure situations and rapidly changing environments may find themselves focusing on performance and neglecting organizational health. The leadership team may not understand the full value of investing in organizational health, the right resources may not be allocated to it, or leaders may simply lack the capabilities and experience needed to address it. But when leaders fail to address organizational health, they fail to help their agencies reach their full potential for performance….

Define and implement a bold performance agenda

Government leaders are under intense pressure to rapidly deliver better performance for their constituents at a low cost—all within a high-stakes, often opaque environment of unprecedented change. Our experience indicates that the most successful transformations include the following four elements.

Aspirational goals. When leaders set goals that are aspirational—those that seek to achieve an organization’s full potential—performance gains are higher. Bold goals set using internal and external performance benchmarks force organizations to think differently and inspirationally and to move beyond the normal incrementalism that marks yearly budget planning or strategy setting. Once set, these aspirational goals can be shared widely and transparently across the organization—at employee town-hall meetings, in senior-leadership meetings, and on message boards and computer screens throughout the office—to increase buy-in and translate to clear and measurable bench­marks for all staff. Top leaders should also genuinely commit themselves and their organizations to achieving the targets.

Balanced portfolio of pragmatic initiatives. Aspirational goals will guide the changes to come. The best transformations provide opportunities for hundreds of people across the organization to identify and implement concrete performance improvements. Initiatives will help achieve the aspirational goals and can be filtered based on priority—What should we accomplish this quarter? What can we push to next quarter to ensure our focus remains on the top priorities?—and then tied to initiative owners who will drive them to completion. Senior leaders can then commit to supporting initiative owners as sponsors who remove roadblocks and coaches who expedite decision making.

Execution ‘engine.’ Leaders can set a series of regularly scheduled meetings, weekly or monthly, to focus on reviewing performance and results, taking care to go beyond progress on activities. This engine provides a regular and open channel for teams to elevate key issues, get to the heart of problems, and build a forum for low-stakes dialogue. The most successful organizations have a regular rhythm to these meetings and focus on reviewing whether teams are achieving results, what can be done to move faster and work more effectively, and what barriers need to be removed…(More)”.

The Time Tax

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Annie Lowrey: “…In my decade-plus of social-policy reporting, I have mostly understood these stories as facts of life. Government programs exist. People have to navigate those programs. That is how it goes. But at some point, I started thinking about these kinds of administrative burdens as the “time tax”—a levy of paperwork, aggravation, and mental effort imposed on citizens in exchange for benefits that putatively exist to help them. This time tax is a public-policy cancer, mediating every American’s relationship with the government and wasting countless precious hours of people’s time.

The issue is not that modern life comes with paperwork hassles. The issue is that American benefit programs are, as a whole, difficult and sometimes impossible for everyday citizens to use. Our public policy is crafted from red tape, entangling millions of people who are struggling to find a job, failing to feed their kids, sliding into poverty, or managing a disabling health condition.

… the government needs to simplify. For safety-net programs, this means eliminating asset tests, work requirements, interviews, and other hassles. It means federalizing programs like unemployment insurance and Medicaid. It means cross-coordinating, so that applicants are automatically approved for everything for which they qualify.

Finally, it needs to take responsibility for the time tax. Congress needs to pump money into the civil service and into user-friendly, citizen-centered programmatic design. And the federal government needs to reward states and the executive agencies for increasing uptake and participation rates, while punishing them for long wait times and other bureaucratic snafus.

Such changes would eliminate poverty and encourage trust in government. They would make American lives easier and simpler. Yes, Washington should give Americans more money and more security. But most of all, it should give them back their time….(More)”.

….

Medical crowdfunding has become essential in India, but it’s leaving many behind

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Akanksha Singh: “In May, as India grappled with a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic, Mahan and Nishan Sekhon found themselves stretched thin. Their mother had contracted black fungus, a potentially lethal disease. The treatment, at a cost of $1,300 per day, had exhausted their insurance plan and burned through their savings. As a last resort, they turned to Ketto, a crowdfunding platform. 

They shared the campaign within their social networks in mid-June, and within a month the brothers had secured $59,000 of their $76,000 goal. “I even got a call from an [Indian man] in Belgium,” Mahan Sekhon told Rest of World. “His Spanish restaurant manager told him [about the fundraiser].”

This is how Ketto is supposed to work. In a country where out-of-pocket expenses account for nearly 63% of total health expenditures, crowdfunding fills a void in medical needs for thousands of Indians. During the Covid-19 crisis, in which more than 4 million people are estimated to have died and 10 million people have lost their jobs, Ketto saw a fourfold increase in registered fundraisers, hosting nearly 12,500 Covid-19 relief campaigns and raising $40 million, according to the company.

However, for many people in India, crowdfunding medical care is either impractical or impossible. To access the platforms, users need official documentation and formal bank accounts, which are far from universal. In 2018, the World Bank’s Identification for Development initiative estimated that 162 million Indians lack registration, including people from the trans community, homeless people, sex workers, indigenous peoples, and those from oppressed caste and class backgrounds. Even when they can get on the platforms, they are regularly targeted with hate speech and discrimination.

It means they are, effectively, cut off from services they need, or are forced to rely on the empathy of intermediaries. “People from marginalized communities in India often do not possess identity documents,” lawyer and activist Lara Jesani told Rest of World. “There are sections of people who systematically face the problem of documentation,” she said.

Ketto, an Indian online crowdfunding platform, says it has hosted over 200,000 medical fundraisers.https://www.ketto.org/

Ketto was founded in 2012 as an online marketplace that allows people to raise funds for everything from starting a business to helping nonprofits. The company began to focus on healthcare three years ago, Varun Sheth, the company’s co-founder, told Rest of World. “We realized that [medical fundraising] was where the platform was most effectively used,” he said. The company promotes campaigns through targeted advertising on Facebook and YouTube, helping them to reach a wide audience, including Indian citizens overseas. “We constantly got feedback that people outside India, especially, want to support more causes in India,” Sheth said.

Since its launch, Ketto said it has hosted over 200,000 medical fundraisers and raised over $148 million. The platform recently raised its largest ever medical appeal, $460,000 for Mithra, an infant with spinal muscular atrophy….(More)”.

A comprehensive study of technological change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Scott Murray: The societal impacts of technological change can be seen in many domains, from messenger RNA vaccines and automation to drones and climate change. The pace of that technological change can affect its impact, and how quickly a technology improves in performance can be an indicator of its future importance. For decision-makers like investors, entrepreneurs, and policymakers, predicting which technologies are fast improving (and which are overhyped) can mean the difference between success and failure.

New research from MIT aims to assist in the prediction of technology performance improvement using U.S. patents as a dataset. The study describes 97 percent of the U.S. patent system as a set of 1,757 discrete technology domains, and quantitatively assesses each domain for its improvement potential.

“The rate of improvement can only be empirically estimated when substantial performance measurements are made over long time periods,” says Anuraag Singh SM ’20, lead author of the paper. “In some large technological fields, including software and clinical medicine, such measures have rarely, if ever, been made.”

A previous MIT study provided empirical measures for 30 technological domains, but the patent sets identified for those technologies cover less than 15 percent of the patents in the U.S. patent system. The major purpose of this new study is to provide predictions of the performance improvement rates for the thousands of domains not accessed by empirical measurement. To accomplish this, the researchers developed a method using a new probability-based algorithm, machine learning, natural language processing, and patent network analytics….(More)”.

A framework for assessing intergenerational fairness

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “Concerns about intergenerational fairness have steadily climbed up the priority ladder over the past decade. The 2020 OECD Report on Governance on Youth, Trust and Intergenerational Jusice outlines the intergenerational issues underlying many of today’s most urgent political debates, and we believe these questions will only intensify in coming years.

Ensuring effective long-term decision-making is hard. It requires leaders and decision-makers across public, private and civil society to be incentivised, and for all citizens to be empowered to have a say around the future. To do this will require change in our culture, behaviours, process and systems….

The School of International Futures and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation have created a methodology to assess whether a decision is fair to different generations, now and in the future.

It can be applied by national and local governments, independent institutions, international organisations, foundations, businesses and special interest groups to evaluate the impact of decisions on present and future generations.

The policy assessment methodology is freely available for use under the Creative Commons license for non-commercial use….

Our work on the Framework for Assessing Intergenerational Fairness and the Intergenerational Fairness Observatory are practical first steps to creating this change….(More)“.

Stewardship of global collective behavior

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Joseph B. Bak-Coleman et al: “Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances at low cost. The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems….(More)”.

Chinese web users are writing a new playbook for disaster response

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Shen Lu at Protocol: Severe floods caused by torrential rains in Central China’s Henan province have killed dozens and displaced tens of thousands of residents since last weekend. In parallel with local and central governments’ disaster relief and rescue efforts, Chinese web users have organized online, using technology in novel ways to mitigate risks and rescue those who were trapped in subway cars and neighborhoods submerged in floodwaters.

Chinese web users are no strangers to digital crowdsourcing efforts. During the COVID-19 outbreak, volunteers archived censored media reports and personal stories of suffering from disease or injustice that were scattered on social media, saving them on sharable files on GitHub and broadcasting them via Telegram. Despite pervasive censorship, in times of crisis, Chinese web users have managed to keep information and communications channels open among themselves, and with the rest of the world.

Now, people in one of the most oppressive information environments in the world might be helping write the future playbook for disaster response…

In hard-hit Zhengzhou, the capital city of Henan province, tens of thousands of residents crowdsourced relief assistance over the past 48 hours through a simple shared spreadsheet powered by the Tencent equivalent of Google Sheets (Google products are banned in China). It was created by a college student to allow those awaiting rescue to log their contact and location information.

In the 36 hours that followed, droves of volunteers have logged on, vastly expanding the breadth of information that lives on the document. It now includes contact information for official and unofficial rescue teams, relief resources, shelter locations, phone-charging stations and online medical consultations. At certain points, over 200 people have edited the sheet simultaneously.

Tencent reported that by Wednesday evening Beijing time, volunteers had entered nearly 1,000 data points. The document has received over 2.5 million visits, becoming the most visited Tencent Doc ever and one of the most efficient and powerful rescue and aid platforms started and contributed by civilians.

Similar crowdsourced documents for flooding victims live elsewhere on the internet. On Shimo Docs, a cloud-based productivity suite developed by the Beijing-based startup Shimo, volunteers have aggregated relief and rescue resources’ contacts by cities and counties. These shared documents have made the rounds on social media platforms like Weibo and WeChat in the past few days….(More)”.

Coding Democracy: How Hackers Are Disrupting Power, Surveillance, and Authoritarianism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Maureen Webb: “Hackers have a bad reputation, as shady deployers of bots and destroyers of infrastructure. In Coding Democracy, Maureen Webb offers another view. Hackers, she argues, can be vital disruptors. Hacking is becoming a practice, an ethos, and a metaphor for a new wave of activism in which ordinary citizens are inventing new forms of distributed, decentralized democracy for a digital era. Confronted with concentrations of power, mass surveillance, and authoritarianism enabled by new technology, the hacking movement is trying to “build out” democracy into cyberspace.

Webb travels to Berlin, where she visits the Chaos Communication Camp, a flagship event in the hacker world; to Silicon Valley, where she reports on the Apple-FBI case, the significance of Russian troll farms, and the hacking of tractor software by desperate farmers; to Barcelona, to meet the hacker group XNet, which has helped bring nearly 100 prominent Spanish bankers and politicians to justice for their role in the 2008 financial crisis; and to Harvard and MIT, to investigate the institutionalization of hacking. Webb describes an amazing array of hacker experiments that could dramatically change the current political economy. These ambitious hacks aim to displace such tech monoliths as Facebook and Amazon; enable worker cooperatives to kill platforms like Uber; give people control over their data; automate trust; and provide citizens a real say in governance, along with capacity to reach consensus. Coding Democracy is not just another optimistic declaration of technological utopianism; instead, it provides the tools for an urgently needed upgrade of democracy in the digital era….(More)”.

Data Literacy in Government: How Are Agencies Enhancing Data Skills?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Randy Barrett at FedTech: “The federal government is vast, and the challenge of understanding its oceans of data grows daily. Rather than hiring thousands of new experts, agencies are moving to train existing employees on how to handle the new frontier.

Data literacy is now a common buzzword, spurred by the publication of the Federal Data Strategy 2020 Action Plan last year and the growing empowerment of chief data officers in the government. The document outlines a multiyear, holistic approach to government information that includes building a culture that values data, encouraging strong management and protection and promoting its efficient and appropriate use.

“While the Federal government leads globally in many instances in developing and providing data about the United States and the world, it lacks a robust, integrated approach to using data to deliver on mission, serve the public and steward resources,” the plan notes.

A key pillar of the plan is to “identify opportunities to increase staff data skills,” and it directs all federal agencies to undertake a gap analysis of skills to see where the weaknesses and needs lie….

The Department of Health and Human Services launched its Data Science CoLab in 2017 to boost basic and intermediate data skills. The collaborative program is the first try at a far reaching and cohort-based data-skills training for the agency. In addition to data analytics skills, HHS is currently training hundreds of employees on how to write Python and R.

“Demand for a seat in the Data Science CoLab has grown approximately 800 percent in the past three years, a testament to its success,” says Bishen Singh, a senior adviser in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health. “Beyond skill growth, it has led to incredible time and cost savings, as well as internal career growth for past participants across the department.”

The National Science Foundation was less successful with its Data Science and Data Certification Pilot, which had a class of 10 participants from various federal agencies. The workers were trained in advanced analytics techniques, with a focus on applying data tools to uncover meaning and solve Big Data challenges. However, the vendor curriculum used general data sets rather than agency-specific ones.

“As a result, participants found it more difficult to apply their learnings directly to real-world scenarios,” notes the CDO Council’s “Data Skill Training Program: Case Studies” report. The learning modules were mostly virtual and self-paced. Communication was poor with the vendor, and employees began to lag in completing their coursework. The pilot was discontinued.

Most of the training pilot programs were launched as the pandemic closed down government offices. The shift to virtual learning made progress difficult for some students. Another key lesson: Allow workers to use their new skills quickly, while they’re fresh….(More)”.